Nana Ama Nketia-Quaidoo

Community Development Director

Nana Ama heads ACA’s community-driven development work.  Prior to joining ACA, she contributed to community projects sponsored by USAID as a field officer and monitoring and evaluation specialist.  She also worked as Programs Manager for Gender and Environmental Monitoring Advocates (GEMA), where she was directly involved in helping communities affected by mining to identify alternative sources of livelihood. She has also worked as a Broadcast Journalist and News Editor at “Ahomka” FM, a community radio station, through which she became an active member of Journalists for Human Rights in Ghana’s Central Region.  Nana Ama is a trained teacher who also taught English and Ghanaian Languages in a community senior high school for seven years. She holds a Masters in Human Resource Management (MBA) from the University of Cape Coast Business School and a Bachelors in Ghanaian Languages from the University of Education Winneba.

Lalla Moulati Toure

Legal Director

Lalla is a Malian jurist with over a decade of experience leading legal advocacy struggles for human rights in her home country.  Prior to joining ACA, she worked for the Association malien des Droits de l’Homme, International Federation for Human rights, and the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative.  She founded a legal clinic in Gao to assist enslaved Malians, supported farming communities that were in danger of losing their land, and assisted workers in unfair dismissal cases.  Lalla has been involved with many cases before the Malian courts, as well as the African Commission and African Court of Human and People’s Rights.  She holds a Masters Degree in human rights from the University of Nantes as well as a legal degree from the University of Mali.

Francis Manu

Field Officer

Francis is a native of Donkro Nkwanta in the Bono East Region of Ghana.  He is a sports man and a businessman as well.  With his true passion for community development, he organizes a yearly program in his community which aims at empowering women and uniting the members of the community.

Nnimmo Bassey (President) is a Nigerian architect, environmentalist activist, author and poet, who chaired Friends of the Earth International from 2008 through 2012 and was Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action for two decades. He was one of Time magazine’s Heroes of the Environment in 2009. In 2010, Nnimmo Bassey was named co-winner of the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2012 he was awarded the Rafto Prize. He serves on the Advisory Board and is Director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, an environmental think tank and advocacy organization.

Rachel Davis (Treasurer) is the Managing Director and Treasurer of the Shift Project. She is an Australian lawyer with extensive experience in business and human rights, having worked with business, in government and civil society settings. She served for five years as a legal advisor to Professor John Ruggie, the former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights, as part of his core advisory team that helped develop the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Previously, Rachel served as a strategy and policy advisor to the UN Special Advisor on the “Responsibility to Protect” at the International Peace Institute in New York. She clerked at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and at the High Court of Australia. Rachel has a Masters in Law from Harvard Law School and Bachelors degrees in Law and Politics from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she also lectured and published in law.

Ian Gary is the executive director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition and is a senior policy, research and advocacy professional with over 25 years of experience in fiscal transparency and accountability, international development, and the reform of natural resource governance.  Prior to joining The FACT Coalition as executive director, Ian directed Oxfam America’s policy and advocacy work focused on promoting transparent and accountable financial flows – for example from oil and mining revenues, taxes and aid – to fight poverty.  Based in Washington, DC, Ian led a team of policy managers, advisors and researchers. Prior to joining Oxfam in 2005, Ian was Strategic Issues Advisor for Africa and Strategic Issues Advisor for Extractive Industries at Catholic Relief Services (CRS) from 1999 to 2005. He has held positions with the Ford Foundation as well as international development organizations in the U.S. and Africa.

Michelle Harrison (Vice President) is a Staff Attorney at EarthRights International. She graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2012 where she received the Robert F. Kennedy ‘51 Public Service Fellowship to work with ERI for a year. She then remained at ERI as a Bertha Foundation Fellow. While at UVA, worked in Tanzania for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and with the Innocence Project, providing post-conviction representation. Michelle holds a B.A. in Political Science and Environmental Science and a minor in French from Miami University. At ERI, Michelle has defended the First Amendment rights of activists against abusive discovery from Chevron, helped defend the Dodd-Frank extractive industry disclosure rules on behalf of Oxfam America, and worked on ERI’s U.S. litigation against Chiquita for human rights abuses and Union Carbide (Dow Chemical) for environmental abuses. She is admitted to practice law in Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Marco Simons is Americas Regional Program Director and General Counsel at EarthRights International. He oversees ERI’s use of legal strategies to work with communities around the world in protecting their human rights and their environment. With ERI, Marco has served as counsel on transnational corporate accountability cases including Doe v. Unocal, Wiwa v. Shell, Bowoto v. Chevron, and MaynasCarijano v. Occidental Petroleum, and submitted amicus briefs in numerous other cases. He has written or coauthored several articles and publications on corporate accountability for earth rights abuses as well as taught college and law school courses on human rights. Marco previously worked for ERI on the Robert L. Bernstein Fellowship in International Human Rights after graduating from Yale Law School. Prior to returning to ERI, he clerked for the Honorable Dorothy Wright Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked for the civil rights law firm Hadsell & Stormer, which was co-counsel on Doe v. Unocal and Bowoto v. Chevron. Marco holds an undergraduate degree in environmental science and, prior to law school, worked on developing educational materials on conservation biology. He is currently admitted to practice in California, Washington, D.C., and Washington State, as well as in the U.S. Supreme Court and several other federal courts.